Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ

The Strategy: Five Possible Theories

We believe Christ's resurrection can be
proved with at least as much certainty as any universally
believed and well-documented event in ancient history. To prove
this, we do not need to presuppose anything controversial (e.g.
that miracles happen). But the skeptic must also not presuppose
anything (e.g. that they do not). We do not need to presuppose
that the New Testament is infallible, or divinely inspired or
even true. We do not need to presuppose that there really was an
empty tomb or post-resurrection appearances, as recorded. We need
to presuppose only two things, both of which are hard data,
empirical data, which no one denies: The existence of the New
Testament texts as we have them, and the existence (but not
necessarily the truth) of the Christian religion as we find it
today.

The question is this: Which theory about
what really happened in Jerusalem on that first Easter Sunday can
account for the data?

There are five possible theories:
Christianity, hallucination, myth, conspiracy and swoon.

1

Jesus died

Jesus rose

Christianity

2

Jesus died

Jesus didn't rise—apostles deceived

Hallucination

3

Jesus died

Jesus didn't rise—apostles myth-makers

Myth

4

Jesus died

Jesus didn't rise—apostles deceivers

Conspiracy

5

Jesus didn't die

Swoon

Theories 2 and 4 constitute a dilemma:
if Jesus didn't rise, then the apostles, who taught that he did,
were either deceived (if they thought he did) or deceivers (if
they knew he didn't). The Modernists could not escape this
dilemma until they came up with a middle category, myth. It is
the most popular alternative today.

Thus either (1) the resurrection really
happened, (2) the apostles were deceived by a hallucination, (3)
the apostles created a myth, not meaning it literally, (4) the
apostles were deceivers who conspired to foist on the world the
most famous and successful lie in history, or (5) Jesus only
swooned and was resuscitated, not resurrected. All five theories
are logically possible, and therefore must be fairly investigated—even (1) ! They are also the only
possibilities, unless we include really far-out ideas that
responsible historians have never taken seriously, such as that
Jesus was really a Martian who came in a flying saucer. Or that
he never even existed; that the whole story was the world's
greatest fantasy novel, written by some simple fisherman; that he
was a literary character whom everyone in history mistook for a
real person, including all Christians and their
enemies, until some scholar many centuries later got the real
scoop from sources unnamed.

If we can refute all other theories
(2-5), we will have proved the truth of the resurrection (1). The
form of the argument here is similar to that of most of the
arguments for the existence of God. Neither God nor the
resurrection are directly observable, but from data that are
directly observable we can argue that the only possible adequate
explanation of this data is the Christian one.

We shall take the four non-believing
theories in the following order: from the simplest, least popular
and most easily refuted to the most confusing, most popular and
most complexly refuted: first swoon, then conspiracy, then
hallucination and finally myth.

Refutation of the Swoon
Theory: Nine Arguments

Nine pieces of evidence refute the swoon
theory:

(1)
Jesus could not have survived crucifixion. Roman
procedures were very careful to eliminate that possibility. Roman
law even laid the death penalty on any soldier who let a capital
prisoner escape in any way, including bungling a crucifixion. It
was never done.

(2) The fact that the Roman soldier did not break
Jesus' legs, as he did to the other two crucified criminals (Jn
19:31-33), means that the soldier was sure Jesus was dead.
Breaking the legs hastened the death so that the corpse could be
taken down before the sabbath (v. 31).

(3) John, an eyewitness, certified that he saw blood
and water come from Jesus' pierced heart (Jn 19:34-35). This
shows that Jesus' lungs had collapsed and he had died of
asphyxiation. Any medical expert can vouch for this.

(4)
The body was totally encased in winding sheets
and entombed (Jn 19:38-42).

(5)
The post-resurrection appearances convinced the
disciples, even "doubting Thomas," that Jesus was
gloriously alive (Jn 20:19-29). It is psychologically impossible
for the disciples to have been so transformed and confident if
Jesus had merely struggled out of a swoon, badly in need of a
doctor. A half-dead, staggering sick man who has just had a
narrow escape is not worshiped fearlessly as divine lord and
conquerer of death.

(6)
How were the Roman guards at the tomb
overpowered by a swooning corpse? Or by unarmed disciples? And if
the disciples did it, they knowingly lied when they wrote the
Gospels, and we are into the conspiracy theory, which we will
refute shortly.

(7)
How could a swooning half-dead man have moved
the great stone at the door of the tomb? Who moved the stone if
not an angel? No one has ever answered that question. Neither the
Jews nor the Romans would move it, for it was in both their
interests to keep the tomb sealed, the Jews had the stone put
there in the first place, and the Roman guards would be killed if
they let the body "escape."

The story the Jewish authorities spread,
that the guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body (Mt
28:11-15), is unbelievable. Roman guards would not fall asleep on
a job like that; if they did, they would lose their lives. And
even if they did fall asleep, the crowd and the effort and the
noise it would have taken to move an enormous boulder would have
wakened them. Furthermore, we are again into the conspiracy
theory, with all its unanswerable difficulties (see next
section).

(8)
If Jesus awoke from a swoon, where did he go?
Think this through: you have a living body to deal with now, not
a dead one. Why did it disappear? There is absolutely no data,
not even any false, fantastic, imagined data, about Jesus' life
after his crucifixion, in any sources, friend or foe, at any
time, early or late. A man like that, with a past like that,
would have left traces.

(9) Most simply, the swoon theory necessarily turns
into the conspiracy theory or the hallucination theory, for the
disciples testified that Jesus did not swoon but really died and
really rose.

It may seem that these nine arguments
have violated our initial principle about not presupposing the
truth of the Gospel texts, since we have argued from data in the
texts. But the swoon theory does not challenge the truths in the
texts which we refer to as data; it uses them and explains them
(by swoon rather than resurrection). Thus we use them too. We
argue from our opponents' own premises.

Refutation of the
Conspiracy Theory: Seven Arguments

The apostles were either
deceived or deceivers. Either supposition is difficult, for
it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the
dead. While Jesus was with them, he could sustain them; but
afterwards, if he did not appear to them, who did make them
act? The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite
absurd. Follow it out to the end, and imagine these twelve
men meeting after Jesus' death and conspiring to say that he
has risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers
that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to
fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them
had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still
more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death,
and they would all have been lost. Follow that out. (Pascal, Pensees 322, 310)

The "cruncher" in this
argument is the historical fact that no one, weak or strong,
saint or sinner, Christian or heretic, ever confessed, freely or
under pressure, bribe or even torture, that the whole story of
the resurrection was a fake a lie, a deliberate deception. Even
when people broke under torture, denied Christ and worshiped
Caesar, they never let that cat out of the bag,
never revealed that the resurrection was their conspiracy. For
that cat was never in that bag. No Christians
believed the resurrection was a conspiracy; if they had, they
wouldn't have become Christians.

(2) If they made up the story, they were the most
creative, clever, intelligent fantasists in history, far
surpassing Shakespeare, or Dante or Tolkien. Fisherman's
"fish stories" are never that elaborate, that
convincing, that life-changing, and that enduring.

(3) The disciples' character argues strongly against
such a conspiracy on the part of all of them, with no dissenters.
They were simple, honest, common peasants, not cunning, conniving
liars. They weren't even lawyers! Their sincerity is proved by
their words and deeds. They preached a
resurrected Christ and they lived a resurrected Christ. They
willingly died for their "conspiracy." Nothing proves
sincerity like martyrdom. The change in their lives from fear to
faith, despair to confidence, confusion to certitude, runaway
cowardice to steadfast boldness under threat and persecution, not
only proves their sincerity but testifies to some powerful cause
of it. Can a lie cause such a transformation? Are truth and
goodness such enemies that the greatest good in history—sanctity—has come from the greatest lie?

Use your imagination and sense of
perspective here. Imagine twelve poor, fearful, stupid (read the
Gospels!) peasants changing the hard-nosed Roman world with a
lie. And not an easily digested, attractive lie either. St.
Thomas Aquinas says:

In the midst of the tyranny of
the persecutors, an innumerable throng of people, both simple
and learned, flocked to the Christian faith. In this faith
there are truths proclaimed that surpass every human
intellect; the pleasures of the flesh are curbed; it is
taught that the things of the world should be spurned. Now,
for the minds of mortal men to assent to these things is the
greatest of miracles....This wonderful conversion of the
world to the Christian faith is the clearest witness....For
it would be truly more wonderful than all signs if the world
had been led by simple and humble men to believe such lofty
truths, to accomplish such difficult actions, and to have
such high hopes. (Summa Contra Gentiles,
I, 6)

(4)
There could be no possible motive for such a
lie. Lies are always told for some selfish advantage. What
advantage did the "conspirators" derive from their
"lie" ? They were hated, scorned, persecuted,
excommunicated, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, crucified, boiled
alive, roasted, beheaded, disemboweled and fed to lions—hardly
a catalog of perks!

(5) If the resurrection was a lie, the Jews would
have produced the corpse and nipped this feared superstition in
the bud. All they had to do was go to the tomb and get it. The
Roman soldiers and their leaders were on their side, not the
Christians'. And if the Jews couldn't get the body because the
disciples stole it, how did they do that? The arguments against
the swoon theory hold here too: unarmed peasants could not have
overpowered Roman soldiers or rolled away a great stone while
they slept on duty.

(6) The disciples could not have gotten away with
proclaiming the resurrection in Jerusalem-same time, same
place, full of eyewitnesses—if it had been a lie. William Lane
Craig says,

The Gospels were written in
such a temporal and geographical proximity to the events they
record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate
events....The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim
the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a
few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they
proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the
resurrection (and been believed) under such circumstances had
it not occurred. (Knowing the Truth About
the Resurrection, chapter 6)

(7) If there had been a conspiracy, it would
certainly have been unearthed by the disciples' adversaries, who
had both the interest and the power to expose any fraud. Common
experience shows that such intrigues are inevitably exposed
(Craig, ibid).

In conclusion, if the resurrection was a
concocted, conspired lie, it violates all known historical and
psychological laws of lying. It is, then, as unscientific, as
unrepeatable, unique and untestable as the resurrection itself.
But unlike the resurrection, it is also contradicted by things we
do know (the above points).

Refutation of the
Hallucination Theory: Thirteen Arguments

If you thought you saw a dead man
walking and talking, wouldn't you think it more likely that you
were hallucinating than that you were seeing correctly? Why then
not think the same thing about Christ's resurrection?

(1) There were too many witnesses. Hallucinations
are private, individual, subjective. Christ appeared to Mary
Magdalene, to the disciples minus Thomas, to the disciples
including Thomas, to the two disciples at Emmaus, to the
fisherman on the shore, to James (his "brother" or
cousin), and even to five hundred people at once (1 Cor 15:3-8).
Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of
psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as public
as you can wish. And Paul says in this passage (v. 6) that most
of the five hundred are still alive, inviting any reader to check
the truth of the story by questioning the eyewitnesses—he
could never have done this and gotten away with it, given the
power, resources and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true.

(2) The witnesses were qualified. They were simple,
honest, moral people who had firsthand knowledge of the facts.

(3) The five hundred saw Christ together, at the
same time and place. This is even more remarkable than five
hundred private "hallucinations" at different times and
places of the same Jesus. Five hundred separate Elvis sightings
may be dismissed, but if five hundred simple fishermen in Maine
saw, touched and talked with him at once, in the same town, that
would be a different matter. (The only other dead person we know
of who is reported to have appeared to hundreds of qualified and
skeptical eyewitnesses at once is Mary the mother of Jesus [at
Fatima, to 70,000]. And that was not a claim of physical
resurrection but of a vision.)

(4)
Hallucinations usually last a few seconds or
minutes; rarely hours. This one hung around for forty days (Acts
1:3).

(5) Hallucinations usually happen only once, except
to the insane. This one returned many times, to ordinary people
(Jn 20:19-21:14; Acts 1:3).

(6) Hallucinations come from within, from what we
already know, at least unconsciously. This one said and did
surprising and unexpected things (Acts 1:4,9)—like a real
person and unlike a dream.

(7)
Not only did the disciples not expect this, they
didn't even believe it at first—neither Peter, nor the women,
nor Thomas, nor the eleven. They thought he was a ghost; he had
to eat something to prove he was not (Lk 24:36-43).

(8) Hallucinations do not eat. The resurrected
Christ did, on at least two occasions (Lk 24:42-43; Jn 21:1-14).

(9) The disciples touched him (Mt 28:9; Lk 24:39; Jn
20:27).

(10) They also spoke with him, and he spoke back.
Figments of your imagination do not hold profound, extended
conversations with you, unless you have the kind of mental
disorder that isolates you. But this "hallucination"
conversed with at least eleven people at once, for forty days
(Acts 1:3).

(11) The apostles could not have believed in the
"hallucination" if Jesus' corpse had still been in the
tomb. This is a very simple and telling point; for if it was a
hallucination, where was the corpse? They would have checked for
it; if it was there, they could not have believed.

(12) If the apostles had hallucinated and then spread
their hallucinogenic story, the Jews would have stopped it by
producing the body—unless the disciples had stolen it, in
which case we are back with the conspiracy theory and all its
difficulties.

(13) A hallucination would explain only the
post-resurrection appearances; it would not explain the empty
tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the inability to produce the
corpse. No theory can explain all these data except a real
resurrection. C.S. Lewis says,

Any theory of hallucination
breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention [rather than
fact], it is the oddest invention that ever entered the mind
of man) that on three separate occasions this hallucination
was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Lk 24:13-31; Jn
20:15; 21:4). Even granting that God sent a holy
hallucination to teach truths already widely believed without
it, and far more easily taught by other methods, and certain
to be completely obscured by this, might we not at least hope
that he would get the face of the hallucination right?
Is he who made all faces such a bungler that he cannot even
work up a recognizable likeness of the Man who was
himself? (Miracles, chapter
16)

Some of these arguments are as old as
the Church Fathers. Most go back to the eighteenth century,
especially William Paley. How do unbelievers try to answer them?
Today, few even try to meet these arguments, although
occasionally someone tries to refurbish one of the three theories
of swoon, conspiracy or hallucination (e.g. Schonfield's
conspiratorial The Passover Plot). But
the counter-attack today most often takes one of the two
following forms.

Some dismiss the resurrection simply because it
is miraculous, thus throwing the whole issue back to whether
miracles are possible. They argue, as Hume did, that any other
explanation is always more probable than a miracle. For a
refutation of these arguments, see our chapter on miracles
(chapter 5).

The other form of counter-attack, by far the
most popular, is to try to escape the traditional dilemma of "deceivers" (conspirators) or "deceived" (hallucinators) by interpreting the Gospels as myth—neither
literally true nor literally false, but spiritually or
symbolically true. This is the standard line of liberal theology
departments in colleges, universities and seminaries throughout
the Western world today.

Refutation of the Myth
Theory: Six Arguments

(1) The style of the Gospels is radically and
clearly different from the style of all the myths. Any literary
scholar who knows and appreciates myths can verify this. There
are no overblown, spectacular, childishly exaggerated events.
Nothing is arbitrary. Everything fits in. Everything is
meaningful. The hand of a master is at work here.

Psychological depth is at a maximum. In
myth it is at a minimum. In myth, such spectacular external
events happen that it would be distracting to add much internal
depth of character. That is why it is ordinary people like Alice
who are the protagonists of extra-ordinary adventures like
Wonderland. That character depth and development of everyone in
the Gospels—especially, of course, Jesus himself—is
remarkable. It is also done with an incredible economy of words.
Myths are verbose; the Gospels are laconic (concise).

There are also telltale marks of
eyewitness description, like the little detail of Jesus writing
in the sand when asked whether to stone the adulteress or not (Jn
8:6). No one knows why this is put in; nothing comes of it. The
only explanation is that the writer saw it. If this detail and
others like it throughout all four Gospels were invented, then a
first-century tax collector (Matthew), a "young man"
(Mark), a doctor (Luke), and a fisherman (John) all independently
invented the new genre of realistic fantasy nineteen centuries
before it was reinvented in the twentieth.

The stylistic point is argued so well by
C.S. Lewis in "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism"
(in Christian Reflections and also in Fern-Seed
and Elephants) that we strongly refer the reader to
it as the best comprehensive anti-demythologizing essay we have
seen.

Let us be even more specific. Let us
compare the Gospels with two particular mythic writings from
around that time to see for ourselves the stylistic differences.
The first is the so-called Gospel of Peter, a forgery from around
A.D. 125 which John Dominic Crossan (of the "Jesus
Seminar"), a current media darling among the doubters,
insists is earlier than the four Gospels. As William Lane Craig
puts it:

In this account, the tomb is
not only surrounded by Roman guards but also by all the
Jewish Pharisees and elders as well as a great multitude from
all the surrounding countryside who have come to watch the
resurrection. Suddenly in the night there rings out a loud
voice in heaven, and two men descend from heaven to the tomb.
The stone over the door rolls back by itself, and they go
into the tomb. The three men come out of the tomb, two of
them holding up the third man. The heads of the two men reach
up into the clouds, but the head of the third man reaches
beyond the clouds. Then a cross comes out of the tomb, and a
voice from heaven asks, 'Have you preached to them that
sleep?' And the cross answers, 'Yes.' (Apologetics,
p. 189)

Here is a second comparison, from
Richard Purtill:

It may be worthwhile to take a
quick look, for purposes of comparison at the closest thing
we have around the time of the Gospels to an attempt at a
realistic fantasy. This is the story of Apollonius of Tyana,
written about A.D. 250 by Flavius Philostratus....There is
some evidence that a neo-Pythagorean sage named Apollonius
may really have lived, and thus Philostratus' work is a real
example of what have thought the Gospels to be: a
fictionalized account of the life of a real sage and teacher,
introducing miraculous elements to build up the prestige of
the central figure. It thus gives us a good look at what a
real example of a fictionalized biography would look like,
written at a time and place not too far removed from those in
which the Gospels were written.

The first thing we notice is
the fairy-tale atmosphere. There is a rather nice little
vampire story, which inspired a minor poem by Keats entitled
Lamia. There are animal stories about, for instance, snakes
in India big enough to drag off and eat an elephant. The sage
wanders from country to country and wherever he goes he is
likely to be entertained by the king or emperor, who holds
long conversations with him and sends him on his way with
camels and precious stones.

Here is a typical passage
about healing miracles: 'A woman who had had seven
miscarriages was cured through the prayers of her husband, as
follows. The Wise Man told the husband, when his wife was in
labor, to bring a live rabbit under his cloak to the place
where she was, walk around her and immediately release the
rabbit; for she would lose her womb as well as her baby if
the rabbit was not immediately driven away.' [Bk 3, sec 39]

The point is that this is what
you get when the imagination goes to work. Once the
boundaries of fact are crossed we wander into fairyland. And
very nice too, for amusement or recreation. But the Gospels
are set firmly in the real Palestine of the first century,
and the little details are not picturesque inventions but the
real details that only an eyewitness or a skilled realistic
novelist can give. (Thinking About Religion,
p. 75-76)

(2) A second problem is that there was not enough
time for myth to develop. The original demythologizers pinned
their case onto a late second-century date for the writing of the
Gospels; several generations have to pass before the added
mythological elements can be mistakenly believed to be facts.
Eyewitnesses would be around before that to discredit the new,
mythic versions. We know of other cases where myths and legends
of miracles developed around a religious founder—for example,
Buddha, Lao-tzu and Muhammad. In each case, many generations
passed before the myth surfaced.

The dates for the writing of the Gospels
have been pushed back by every empirical manuscript discovery;
only abstract hypothesizing pushes the date forward. Almost no
knowledgeable scholar today holds what Bultmann said it was
necessary to hold in order to believe the myth theory, namely,
that there is no first-century textual evidence that Christianity
began with a divine and resurrected Christ, not a human and dead
one.

Some scholars still dispute the
first-century date for the Gospels, especially John's. But no one
disputes that Paul's letters were written within the lifetime of
eyewitnesses to Christ. So let us argue from Paul's letters.
Either these letters contain myth or they do not. If so, there is
lacking the several generations necessary to build up a commonly
believed myth. There is not even one generation.
If these letters are not myth, then the Gospels
are not either, for Paul affirms all the main claims of the
Gospels.

Julius Muller put the anti-myth argument this way:

One cannot imagine how such a
series of legends could arise in an historical age, obtain
universal respect, and supplant the historical recollection
of the true character [Jesus]....if eyewitnesses were still
at hand who could be questioned respecting the truth of the
recorded marvels. Hence, legendary fiction, as it likes not
the clear present time but prefers the mysterious gloom of
gray antiquity, is wont to seek a remoteness of age, along
with that of space, and to remove its boldest and most rare
and wonderful creations into a very remote and unknown
land. (The Theory of Myths in Its
Application to the Gospel History Examined and Confuted
[London, 1844], p. 26)

Muller challenged his nineteenth-century
contemporaries to produce a single example anywhere in history of
a great myth or legend arising around a historical figure and
being generally believed within thirty years after that figure's
death. No one has ever answered him.

(3) The myth theory has two layers. The first layer
is the historical Jesus, who was not divine, did not claim
divinity, performed no miracles, and did not rise from the dead.
The second, later, mythologized layer is the Gospels as we have
them, with a Jesus who claimed to be divine, performed miracles
and rose from the dead. The problem with this theory is simply
that there is not the slightest bit of any real evidence whatever
for the existence of any such first layer. The two-layer cake
theory has the first layer made entirely of air—and hot air at
that.

St. Augustine refutes the two-layer
theory with his usual condensed power and simplicity:

The speech of one Elpidius,
who had spoken and disputed face to face against the
Manichees, had already begun to affect me at Carthage, when
he produced arguments from Scripture which were not easy to
answer. And the answer they [the Manichees, who claimed to be
the true Christians] gave seemed to me feeble—indeed they
preferred not to give it in public but only among ourselves
in private—the answer being that the Scriptures of the New
Testament had been corrupted by some persons unknown...yet
the Manicheans made no effort to produce uncorrupted
copies. (Confessions, V, 11,
Sheed translation)

Note the sarcasm in the last sentence.
It still applies today. William Lane Craig summarizes the
evidence—the lack of evidence:

The Gospels are a miraculous
story, and we have no other story handed down to us than that
contained in the Gospels....The letters of Barnabas and
Clement refer to Jesus' miracles and resurrection. Polycarp
mentions the resurrection of Christ, and Irenaeus relates
that he had heard Polycarp tell of Jesus' miracles. Ignatius
speaks of the resurrection. Quadratus reports that persons
were still living who had been healed by Jesus. Justin Martyr
mentions the miracles of Christ. No relic of a non-miraculous
story exists. That the original story should be lost and
replaced by another goes beyond any known example of
corruption of even oral tradition, not to speak of the
experience of written transmissions. These facts show that
the story in the Gospels was in substance the same story that
Christians had at the beginning. This means...that the
resurrection of Jesus was always a part of the story. (Apologetics,
chapter 6)

(4) A little detail, seldom noticed, is significant
in distinguishing the Gospels from myth: the first witnesses of
the resurrection were women. In first-century Judaism, women had
low social status and no legal right to serve as witnesses. If
the empty tomb were an invented legend, its inventors surely
would not have had it discovered by women, whose testimony was
considered worthless. If, on the other hand, the writers were
simply reporting what they saw, they would have to tell the
truth, however socially and legally inconvenient.

(5) The New Testament could not be myth
misinterpreted and confused with fact because it specifically
distinguishes the two and repudiates the mythic interpretation (2
Peter 1:16). Since it explicitly says it is not myth, if it is
myth it is a deliberate lie rather than myth. The dilemma still
stands. It is either truth or lie, whether deliberate
(conspiracy) or non-deliberate (hallucination). There is no
escape from the horns of this dilemma. Once a child asks whether
Santa Claus is real, your yes becomes a lie, not myth, if he is
not literally real. Once the New Testament distinguishes myth
from fact, it becomes a lie if the resurrection is not fact.

(6) William Lane Craig has summarized the
traditional textual arguments with such clarity, condensation and
power that we quote him here at length. The following arguments
(rearranged and outlined from Knowing the Truth About
the Resurrection) prove two things: first, that the
Gospels were written by the disciples, not later myth-makers, and
second, that the Gospels we have today are essentially the same
as the originals.

(A) Proof that the Gospels were written by
eyewitnesses:

1. Internal evidence, from the Gospels
themselves:

The style of writing in the Gospels is
simple and alive, what we would expect from their
traditionally accepted authors.

Moreover, since Luke was written before
Acts, and since Acts was written prior to the death of
Paul, Luke must have an early date, which speaks for its
authenticity.

The Gospels also show an intimate
knowledge of Jerusalem prior to its destruction in A.D.
70. The Gospels are full of proper names, dates, cultural
details, historical events, and customs and opinions of
that time.

Jesus' prophecies of that event (the
destruction of Jerusalem) must have been written prior to
Jerusalem's fall, for otherwise the church would have
separated out the apocalyptic element in the prophecies,
which makes them appear to concern the end of the world.
Since the end of the world did not come about when
Jerusalem was destroyed, the so-called prophecies of its
destruction that were really written after the city was
destroyed would not have made that event appear so
closely connected with the end of the world. Hence, the
Gospels must have been written prior to A.D. 70.

The stories of Jesus' human weaknesses
and of the disciples' faults also bespeak the Gospels'
accuracy.

Furthermore, it would have been
impossible for forgers to put together so consistent a
narrative as that which we find in the Gospels. The
Gospels do not try to suppress apparent discrepancies,
which indicates their originality (written by
eyewitnesses). There is no attempt at harmonization
between the Gospels, such as we might expect from
forgers.

The Gospels do not contain anachronisms;
the authors appear to have been first-century Jews who
were witnesses of the events.

We may conclude that there is no more
reason to doubt that the Gospels come from the traditional
authors than there is to doubt that the works of Philo or
Josephus are authentic, except that the Gospels
contain supernatural events.

2. External evidence:

The disciples must have left some
writings, engaged as they were in giving lessons to and
counseling believers who were geographically distant; and
what could these writings be if not the Gospels and
epistles themselves? Eventually the apostles would have
needed to publish accurate narratives of Jesus' history,
so that any spurious attempts would be discredited and
the genuine Gospels preserved.

There were many eyewitnesses who were
still alive when the books were written who could testify
whether they came from their purported authors or not.

With a single exception, no apocryphal
gospel is ever quoted by any known author during the
first three hundred years after Christ. In fact there is
no evidence that any inauthentic gospel whatever existed
in the first century, in which all four Gospels and Acts
were written.

(B) Proof that the Gospels we have today are the
same Gospels originally written:

Because of the need for instruction and
personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many
times, which increases the chances of preserving the original
text.

In fact, no other ancient work is available
in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various
versions agree in content.

The text has also remained unmarred by
heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide
geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been
transmitted with only trifling discrepancies. The differences
that do exist are quite minor and are the result of
unintentional mistakes.

The quotations of the New Testament books in
the early Church Fathers all coincide.

The Gospels could not have been corrupted
without a great outcry on the part of all orthodox
Christians.

No one could have corrupted all the manuscripts.

There is no precise time when the
falsification could have occurred, since, as we have seen,
the New Testament books are cited by the Church Fathers in
regular and close succession. The text could not have been
falsified before all external testimony, since then the
apostles were still alive and could repudiate such tampering.

The text of the New Testament is every bit
as good as the text of the classical works of antiquity. To
repudiate the textual parity of the Gospels would be to
reverse all the rules of criticism and to reject all the
works of antiquity, since the text of those works is less
certain than that of the Gospels.

Richard Purtill summarizes the textual
case:

Many events which are regarded
as firmly established historically have (1) far less
documentary evidence than many biblical events; (2) and the
documents on which historians rely for much secular history
are written much longer after the event than many records of
biblical events; (3) furthermore, we have many more copies of
biblical narratives than of secular histories; and (4) the
surviving copies are much earlier than those on which our
evidence for secular history is based. If the biblical
narratives did not contain accounts of miraculous events,
biblical history would probably be regarded as much more
firmly established than most of the history of, say,
classical Greece and Rome. (Thinking About
Religion, p. 84-85)

Conclusions: More
Objections Answered

No alternative to a real resurrection
has yet explained: the existence of the Gospels, the origin of
the Christian faith, the failure of Christ's enemies to produce
his corpse, the empty tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the
accounts of the post-resurrection appearances. Swoon, conspiracy,
hallucination and myth have been shown to be the only
alternatives to a real resurrection, and each has been refuted.

What reasons could be given at this
point for anyone who still would refuse to believe? At this
point, general rather than specific objections are usually given.
For instance:

Objection 1: History is not an exact science. It does not
yield absolute certainty like mathematics.

Reply: This is true, but why would you note that fact
now and not when you speak of Caesar or Luther or George
Washington? History is not exact, but it is sufficient. No one
doubts that Caesar crossed the Rubicon; why do many doubt that
Jesus rose from the dead? The evidence for the latter is much
better than for the former.

Reply: This is simply ignorance. Not trusting documents
is like not trusting telescopes. Paper evidence suffices for most
of what we believe; why should it suddenly become suspect here?

Objection 3: Because the resurrection is miraculous. It's the
content of the idea rather than the documentary evidence for it
that makes it incredible.

Reply: Now we finally have a straightforward objection—not to the documentary evidence but to miracles. This is a
philosophical question, not a scientific, historical or textual
question. (See chapter five in this book for an answer).

Kreeft and Nevins dialogue on experiencing Charismatic Gifts—catalysts to more interactive, “two-way” prayer. See also:
charismatic.peterkreeft.com

Objection 4: It's not only miracles in general but this
miracle in particular that is objectionable. The resurrection of
a corpse is crass, crude, vulgar, literalistic and materialistic.
Religion should be more spiritual, inward, ethical.

Reply: If religion is what we invent, we can make it
whatever we like. If it is what God invented, then we have to
take it as we find it, just as we have to take the universe as we
find it, rather than as we'd like it to be. Death
is crass, crude, vulgar, literal and material. The resurrection
meets death where it is and conquers it, rather than merely
spouting some harmless, vaporous abstractions about spirituality.
The resurrection is as vulgar as the God who did it. He also made
mud and bugs and toenails.

Objection 5: But a literalistic interpretation of the
resurrection ignores the profound dimensions of meaning found in
the symbolic, spiritual and mythic realms that have been deeply
explored by other religions. Why are Christians so narrow and
exclusive? Why can't they see the profound symbolism in the idea
of resurrection?

Reply: They can. It's not either-or. Christianity does
not invalidate the myths, it validates them, by incarnating them.
It is "myth become fact," to use the title of a germane
essay by C.S. Lewis (in God in the Dock). Why prefer a
one-layer cake to a two-layer cake? Why refuse either the
literal-historical or the mythic-symbolic aspects of the
resurrection? The Fundamentalist refuses the mythic-symbolic
aspects because he has seen what the Modernist has done with it:
used it to exclude the literal-historical aspects. Why have the
Modernists done that? What terrible fate awaits them if they
follow the multifarious and weighty evidence and argument that
naturally emerges from the data, as we have summarized it here in
this chapter?

The answer is not obscure: traditional
Christianity awaits them, complete with adoration of Christ as
God, obedience to Christ as Lord, dependence on Christ as Savior,
humble confession of sin and a serious effort to live Christ's
life of self-sacrifice, detachment from the world, righteousness,
holiness and purity of thought, word and deed. The historical
evidence is massive enough to convince the open-minded inquirer.
By analogy with any other historical event, the resurrection has
eminently credible evidence behind it. To disbelieve it, you must
deliberately make an exception to the rules you use everywhere
else in history. Now why would someone want to do that?

Ask yourself that question if you dare,
and take an honest look into your heart before you answer.